An aspiring bioengineer, Alex Sathler was walking through the streets of London with a friend last summer when he pulled out his phone and saw that he’d been chosen for a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship right before entering graduate school. He couldn’t believe his luck.
The Graduate Research Fellowship Program award comes with an annual stipend of $37,000 for three years, giving him major street cred in an academic system where securing funding can make or break careers. Around 12,000 students apply for the NSF fellowship each year, with just 1,000 to 2,000 winners selected annually. More than 40 past recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
“I was glowing that whole day,” said Sathler, who went to community college in Portland, Ore., before attending Oregon State University, where he fell in love with research.
But in a year when the Trump administration upended the science ecosystem, having his own funding didn’t turn out to be a golden ticket. The first-year Ph.D. student, who’s enrolled in a program run jointly by the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco, was turned away by two labs where he had hoped to work on his dissertation. The lab heads told him they just can’t afford to take on more students right now. Another hasn’t replied at all. Many of his classmates have had similar experiences, he added.
“Everyone in my program deserves to be in their dream lab,” he said. “The real sense that I get is that there aren’t enough labs with funding to give everyone their best fit.”
Sathler and his cohort aren’t alone. First-year biomedical graduate students throughout the country told STAT that labs have been hesitant to take them in due to a tenuous funding environment, with the National Institutes of Health funding fewer projects last year and on track to do the same in 2026. The current climate has heated up competition for scarce slots in well-funded labs and left some students disillusioned when professors who’d said they would be happy to have them join have reneged on commitments.
These issues are more likely to prolong students’ search for a lab than to keep them out of one altogether, in some cases leading them to work on projects they’re less interested in. But the uncertainty is causing some budding scientists to question whether they can carve out careers in the fiercely competitive world of academic research, where there are too many people vying for too few funding dollars.
“The strain that you’re hearing is real. It’s not an isolated case. It’s actually across the board,” said Chevelle Newsome, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, an organization with more than 450 member universities. “These are deep issues that we should be concerned about.”
Some Ph.D. programs anticipated this squeeze last year and reduced incoming class sizes by a third or more in response to the threat of funding cuts from the Trump administration, but recently released data show overall biomedical graduate enrollment (master’s and doctoral) rose slightly last fall.
Life science Ph.D. students typically spend much of their first year doing rotations, which are a bit like scientific speed dating. They work briefly in three or four labs, spending a few months in each before finding a group with the right research focus and culture — and an adviser willing to support a trainee for the five to six years it typically takes to complete a Ph.D.
That last part is where things have gotten tricky, according to Hannah Barsouk, a biochemistry student at Stanford. Barsouk said six to 10 labs have told her they’re not sure they’d have the funding to accept a new student. She has reached out to 30 to 40 labs in total and keeps a running list on whether she’s heard good things about a group and whether they’re taking students. Barsouk checks those notes every other day, and she said funding issues have cast a “cloud of general anxiety” over her first year.
She is currently sojourning in a lab that has four other rotation students. Barsouk knows there won’t be enough space to take all of them.
“If I’m being honest, I do think that there is kind of this atmosphere of maybe not wanting to openly acknowledge the competition,” she said. “Even in talking to other rotation students in the lab, [they’ll ask], ‘Oh, how many hours were you here?’ Kind of a sense of, maybe if you spend more time, that means that’ll guarantee you a spot in the lab, which is not even necessarily true.”
At other schools, funding worries mean that rotations are no longer an option. Georgia Tech and Emory University switched last year to a direct-admission system for their joint bioengineering program due to “evolving funding conditions,” according to an email reviewed by STAT. Applicants must now find a lab willing to take them before they’re offered admission. This approach is more common in Europe, but it means students must rely on conversations with lab members and advisers rather than firsthand experience to select a lab where they can do their dissertation research. A chair of graduate admissions for the program did not respond to requests for comment.
While Stanford hasn’t taken that step, it has reduced independent funding for its bioscience graduate students from four to two years, after which advisers have to cover students’ stipends out of their research grants, unless the students secure another funding source. The university plans to reduce this funding guarantee to one year this fall for incoming students, according to an internal email obtained by STAT.
“It just makes us much, much more vigilant in terms of who we want to take,” said Joe Wu, director of Stanford Cardiovascular Institute. “Unless the student’s outstanding, then you’re not going to commit.”
In some cases, extra vigilance means that faculty have backed away from initial commitments. One biology student, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said that she accepted an offer from a graduate program because a professor had virtually guaranteed she’d have space for her. That all changed in November, the student said, during a rotation in that faculty member’s lab. The two of them were going over her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) application when the professor turned to her and said, “You really need this to join my lab.”
Part of her understood that the lab head was in a tricky position; one of the group’s grants had been terminated due to the Trump administration’s push to stop funding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. But she couldn’t help feeling betrayed.
“I was kind of catfished,” the student said. “I kind of feel pretty screwed.”
Even for Sathler, navigating the start of graduate school has been complicated. He said he’s had labs say that the GRFP fellowship, while helpful, wouldn’t cover his full salary, with some groups adding that they’re downsizing. Another sign of the times: A fall seminar course in Sathler’s program, where faculty sell first-years on joining their labs, struggled to fill speaking slots.
Sathler, whose research interests include neurologic disease, still has time to find a lab. So do most first-year students, who typically have until the start of their second year to join a research group. It’s possible funding concerns could ease by then, with congressional appropriations committees recently endorsing a slight budget increase for the National Institutes of Health, though the Senate still needs to vote on a compromise bill.
But the administration’s shakeup of the longstanding research pact between universities and the federal government has left students worried not just about the next few years of their training, but about their long-term futures. After learning that her chances of joining her dream lab were slim, the biology student STAT spoke with applied late last year to a pair of graduate programs at other universities — even though she is already in graduate school.
Neither attempt panned out, leaving her in limbo for now. Joining another lab at her institution might be an option, but that would mean abandoning her main research interests, and other groups have also been cagey about funding. Even if she can find a lab in the coming months, she’s beginning to question whether the goal that brought her to graduate school — one day running a lab of her own — is attainable in the current environment.
“I still very much want to be a professor, and I just don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible because of the way NIH and the NSF are being dismantled,” she said. “I try to avoid looking further ahead, because it just gets bleak.”
STAT’s coverage of the federal government’s impact on the biomedical workforce is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation and the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
